Neglected Topographies And Cosmologies of Care

Topos/graphia is the art of drawing and writing (graphia, or making graphic) a place (topos) into being. This archaic meaning of the “topographical” brings us back to past peripatetic ways of coming to know a place: ways that understand space as temporal, volatile, fleeting and fluid, and told and mapped through mental images and storytelling. The “topographical” hints at neglected knowledge pathways and almost-forgotten liminal places existing outside of modern cartographic mediums that try to visually pinpoint whole moving and living worlds into static Cartesian space.

Ephemeral, ghostly, and fragile—the shapeshifting intertidal zone comes to mind as a neglected topography, evading capture in the known world of maps. In the rising and falling of the tides, land disappears into the sea, and at other times the water parts to reveal hidden tidal ecologies and magical places that invoke stories of ghost islands, mirror beaches, and reef monsters. Salvaging the coastline…